
The Mexican constitution guarantees the right to keep a gun in your home for self-defense. The guns must be registered with the military and there are calibers or ammunition, magazines, and weapons that a private citizen may not own or possess. The permitted calibers are .22, .25,, .380 auto and .38; not .38+P or .38 super. The calibers with restrictions for private citizens are .38 P, .38 Super, .357 Magnum, 9 mm, 10 mm, 40 mm, 45 mm, and 44 magnum. Private citizens may also not own any semi-automatic military style rifles such as AK47s, those that shoot .223 rounds and 7.62 x 39 rounds. The .380 auto is legal because, technically, it is 9 millimeter short, while the 9 mm is not permitted.
There is one gun store in all of Mexico, in Mexico City, where you have to file paperwork to receive permission to buy a gun and receive a transportation permit to transport it back to your house. If you legally have a weapon, you can buy ammunition for your weapon.
There are two additional ways you can also own a gun. One is to be a member of a gun club. With that gun club membership, you can buy more guns, buy ammunition for those guns, and have permission for a certain number of days per week to transport the weapon from between your house to the gun club and back. Another way to legally own a gun is to have hunting permission, with which you can transport the weapon between your house and where you’re going to hunt, and you get to pick a few different states within which to be able to transport the weapon, which has to be unloaded in the trunk of your car.
In a recent case of a gentleman who got caught bringing guns into Mexico, there were several issues. I believe one was that one or more of the guns were of a prohibited caliber. Also, you need to declare all your guns you’re bringing (importing) into Mexico. It can be easier to purchase weapons in Mexico because you don’t have to worry about exporting from the US and then importing into Mexico and declaring. However, it is not a good idea to buy guns from the police or from a private party unless they have registered that firearm with the military. The reason is that, sometimes, the police will confiscate guns from people they have arrested or detained and sell that same gun to a private citizen. If you purchase that gun and you shoot somebody with it even in self defense and they do a ballistics test and find out that gun was used in a murder two or three years ago, they could easily conclude that you have the murder weapon, so you must be the murderer. And the police are not likely to say, “Yes, we illegally sold the weapon to a person that we took off a detainee.”
If a client wants to buy a gun from a private party and that private party swears that they brought it in or they smuggled it in from the US, we advise our clients to have the private party seller take the gun to a military base and register the gun in their name. Then, once the gun is registered in the seller’s name, the seller can transfer it to our client. That way there’s a record of the gun in the other person’s name prior to the purchase by our client, and if there’s a problem, it can be proven that our client wasn’t the person who used the gun in a crime prior to their purchase.